Spontaneity, incompleteness, and unconventionality characterize Isa Genzken’s iconic artistic practice developed over the last five decades. Working in diverse mediums and materials throughout her expansive career, Genzken is well-known for her sculptures, installations, and films that explore contemporary realism. Since the late 1990s, Isa Genzken has been working with everyday objects as insignia of the consumer world, combining them with industrial decorative materials as well as image fragments from popular media and personal photographs. She creates unique assemblages, wall pieces, and three-dimensional sceneries in various scales from what she calls “real-world materials,” such as mass-produced toys, cheap consumer goods, ubiquitous cardboard boxes, and shiny Mylar.

Along with the detritus materials in many of Genzken’s works, social space and interaction are additional critical components of her work. Mirrors or reflective surfaces allow her viewers to see themselves reflected in the works. Frequently, her sculptures and installations animate the viewer to make moves around and put themselves in relation to them. Thus, the viewer’s actions become part of the work and lend to the sense of uncertainty and spontaneity that Genzken modishly plays with. The feeling of empty space is connected to the artist’s constant interest in architectural forms. Raised in the reformation phase of postwar West Germany, Genzken uses in her works the deconstructed or reconstructed ruins of the urban landscape as a method to convey ideas of loss, imperfection, and modernity.

In recent years, Genzken has created life-size scenes with mannequins that she dresses in her own worn clothing, complemented by work and protective clothing, and finally accentuated with decorative materials and spray paint. Blinded by reflective foils or silenced with colorful adhesive tape, the figures become poignantly close and undisguised self-portraits of the artist. In her series Schauspieler [Actor], which includes the 2015 works presented at the Bienal, she stages her mannequin as “actors” in various configurations seemingly based on narratives to convey layers of issues, from sociopolitics to the media and the body. Their story is everchanging, on the one hand dependent on and relevant to the region and period in which they are displayed. Generally seen in troupe formations, occasionally as a family, these arragement of figurines, on the other hand, reflect basic human relationship constellations. Withdrawn and vacuous, they exude a sense of incompleteness and confounding campiness when viewed. Yet, alone in the space, they are another part of the architecture, functioning as a caryatid standing as detached architectural support and column watching the world’s current change over time.